Review: The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks by Shauna Robinson

Title: The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks

Author: Shauna Robinson

Year published: 2022

Category: Adult fiction

Pages: 336 pages

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Location: (my 2023 Google Reading map): USA (MD, Washington, DC)

Summary: When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary society insists on keeping the bookstore stuck in the past, and Maggie is banned from selling anything written this century. So, when a series of mishaps suddenly tip the bookstore toward ruin, Maggie will have to get creative to keep the shop afloat.

And in Maggie's world, book rules are made to be broken.

To help save the store, Maggie starts an underground book club, running a series of events celebrating the books readers actually love. But keeping the club quiet, selling forbidden books, and dodging the literary society is nearly impossible. Especially when Maggie unearths a town secret that could upend everything.

Maggie will have to decide what's more important: the books that formed a small town's history, or the stories poised to change it all.

Review: I have seen this one around only a bit, but the reviews have been good and it counts for Susan's Bookish Books challenge so in I jumped. And then, I floundered. I started this book in the middle of my "no books are working for me" phase a couple weeks back so this week I checked out the audio book from Hoopla and I finished it in 2 days. Such fun!

This book has lots going on: friendship, personal waywardness and success, romance, and one town's obsession with an author. It's fun, funny, made me smile, and yes, the ending is perfect. Everyone is happy in the end, the romance works, the town will thrive, and I love it. Given all the negative in the news, the intense books we read, when a book comes along that ends happily for all involved I am all for it.

I like Maggie and the large cast of characters from the old curmudgeon to the nasty society boss to the mysterious love interest. They all bring something to the story and the mood of the book that made me happy.

And really, this novel is all about a bookshop, author events, an author, and books. What more could we want?!

Challenges for which this counts: